Q. Dear Daniel, over the course of my life I have worked hard, worked in places that many would not go, have been fairly conservative in my spending, yet my/our wealth just seems to be taken away from me/us. I don't understand what is going on. Can you shed light on what is happening? A. In astrology there are two houses of money, finances and material well-being, the Second and the Eight Houses, the former representing your own personal relationship with abundance and wealth, the former to do with finances that involve others i.e. partners, banks, inheritances etc. Your second house is stacked with mostly good energies, five planets including the Sun, Jupiter and Mercury in Libra, 3 asteroids and the North Node, most of whom represent good energies in this part of your life. Jupiter here in particular is a clear sign of “good karma” financially, while the North Node promises a future of potential abundance. So it is clear that something deeper is sabotaging your financial life.

If we look into your 8th House, we have your South Node in Taurus, which reflects both good and difficult karma gathered over lifetimes to do with not just money but also power in all its forms. As a soul you’ve been in many positions of power, and the lack of it, in life and death situations, and suffered persecution for having power, particularly spiritual and transformative power. This is a part of the reason you’ve been attracted to intense work situations, in some very edgy places and there is a part of you that thrives on the challenges. Persephone, Queen of the Underworld on the Midheaven, the cusp of the house of career, also reflects the continuation of these themes into this life, and having Pallas Athena on your South Node, you’ve been able to call of some very effective warrior energies from deep within to navigate this kind of territory. There is however some shadowy and wounded energies in this past of yours. Classically, an 8th House South Node also represents difficult karma to do with misuse of power, where an individual’s unhealed wounds contaminate their power potentials, which then gets acted out destructively. This karma rebounds onto our financial life in this life and initially compromises the good karma represented by Jupiter. In this context then, the losses you’ve suffered are a part of the karmic payback, the rebalancing of the scales, which has its own timing beyond our ability to influence these things. Fortunately there are current indications that this karma is in the process of breaking up and being healed, so it can’t hurt to investigate this past through readings or regression work. And if the above is beyond your worldview, we can look at other influences that reflect your challenges. All your Libran energy is deeply influenced by the sign’s ruling planet Venus and your Venus is conjunct Saturn in Sagittarius on your 4th house cusp. The goddess of love is severely compromised, again initially, by the repressive expressions of early patriarchal conditioning, her love and her grace held back by excessive and heavy-handed authority. These conditioned voices carry negative messages about your own true nature and about the world and are absorbed deeply in us as children. Basically they describe life as struggle and hard work, where you have to deny those things that are important to your heart and spirit, toughen up and get on with it. Its an attitude based on the belief in lack, that there is not enough whether money, time, energy and is the source of what used to be called poverty consciousness. This conditioning is pervasive and goes deep, often operating subtly well into our adult years and contributing to our challenges around money and self-esteem. Transiting Saturn has been in your 2nd House for the last couple of years and in his contradictory style, flushes up this very conditioning into greater consciousness, so that you can sort out the difference between these conditioned voices from the deeper voices of your own inner authority. It calls for a complete review of how you work, how you treat yourself in the process, where you still carry the voices of the restrictive and wounded masculine that undermine your well-being, let alone your finances. Another layer that is operating here has to do with the “dark feminine” which is very strong in your system. I’ve already mentioned that you have a strong Persephone; along with which you have Hekate on your Cancer Moon and Medusa on your 2nd House Sun. These are primal layers of your inner feminine and are often distorted expressions of the sacred feminine, ones that undermine and sabotage our conscious egos ability to succeed in the world, both as a retributive response from the past and, as a calling from them to be healed and reclaimed. It is highly likely that this has contributed to your losses, as a way of force you to face the dark and toxic shadows in your system, many of which you have absorbed from both sides of your family system. We all know of Medusa for instance as the enraged gorgon who turns men to stone and she has clearly been operating in your financial life, as well as contributing to the disempowerment of parts of your masculine. However, the very same energy, transformed by intensive therapeutic and spiritual practices, can radically empower the very same places in your world. As a man, you have the privilege and the opportunity to create a version of yourself that equally integrates the sacred masculine and feminine within yourself and express that creatively and potently in the world. This will obviously also transform your financial life. There’s a lot of work to be done to achieve this, particularly to do with the toxic rage you carry, but as this happens more of the exceptionally good karma you have via your Jupiter position will be free to manifest. This will also free up your position of Ceres on your Cancer Moon. Ceres is the western equivalent of Laxmi, the goddess of material and spiritual abundance and her position is another expression of latent positive karmas to do with abundance in all its forms. Transiting Jupiter will actually cross your Ceres and Moon in June of next year, so you can look forward to a taste of the tremendous grace she has to offer you.